City Wants Cityville at Cityplace Back on Track

​Perhaps you recall: We had a pretty good back-and-forth back in December '09 over city staff's thoughts on Cityville at Cityplace, the mammoth mixed-use development that's been planned for the former Loews Cityplace site since forever. After Kroger asked for that variance to sell beer and wine closer to Alex W. Spence Middle Learning Center & Talented/Gifted Academy than city code allowed, city staff weighed in with its lengthy critique, summed up as: "This layout is auto-oriented and does not create an urban pedestrian experience on any of the street frontages."

Now it's back before the city council -- at least, the Economic Development Committee, which this morning will be told that to fast-track development it's getting $813,979 from the Cityplace Area TIF -- if, of course, it adheres to a few rules, among them getting its certificate of occupancy by December 31, 2013. (Which means the current opening-by date of 2012 is a little, ya know, off.) Says this morning's briefing, to get the dough -- which is but a fraction of a fraction of the $63.6 million the developer says it'll cost -- Cityville Dallas Haskell Limited Partnership has to build out at least 300 residential units (it promises 356) and 50,000 square feet of retail space (it pinkie swears it'll go twice that). And still on the books: Kroger and that L.A. Fitness.

Also scheduled to receive $815,930 from the Cityplace TIF: another apartment unit scheduled for the northwest corner of N.
Central Expressway and Blackburn Street, next to the Mondrian. That's the tract o' land JLB Partners bought last December -- and, as expected, there's no retail in the developer's plans, which right now call solely for 294 units of residential.

We Recommend

Main reason we cannot keep City maintained ,are all these special finance districts and people not paying tax and receiving tax payer cash to develop.What happen to developer building their own projects.Republicans want to cut Medicaid,Medicare and health care for poor but ,continue to fund welfare for the wealthy.

TIFs are essentially a borrow against future tax revenues generated by the increase in property values of a project. TIFs are used to finance public infrastructural improvements around a site. For example, if I have 20 acres to develop and right now it is vacant. If I develop it, there will be an increase in tax revenue based on the increase in property values generated by the project. This increase pays back a tranche of money used to build the public streets and other related infrastructure through the site.

They are quite a clever tool for redevelopment, except they MUST create an increase in value. We fell a bit too in love with them some time ago and tried using them to build all sorts of very conventional strip centers, which have a very limited lifespan, and that did not improve areas.

Very few grocery stores are every going to be "perfectly urban" in the sense that surface parking lots are not urban. I advise people to check out some New Seasons Market formats in Portland. They are about as urban and embedded into the neighborhood fabric as it gets (unless we're talking about real cities w/ real density that needs no parking at all b/c there is enough density within walking/biking/transit distance). Of course, the neighborhoods in Portland that New Seasons serves are not highway-oriented and the stores are scaled appropriately to the neighborhoods. If we're going to point fingers, we need to focus on the larger system at work here.

There is also the greater question of how many grocery stores can fit within a 3 mile radius... and you'd have to ask the particular grocery store chains about their business model and willingness and ability to compete in such a hyper competitive market. And, what happens to the land/big box building when some of them inevitably go dark...